


Current and Cold

by lynndyre



Category: Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes
Genre: Alternate Universe - Powers, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 15:47:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5503550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/pseuds/lynndyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A killer has been preying on those with powers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Current and Cold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plumedy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plumedy/gifts).



> I loved your requests - platonic h/c is one of my favourite things, and I hope I've done justice to the ice-and-lightning AU!

I must beg your indulgence for beginning a story in the middle, yet for the earliest and most crucially deductive parts of the affair, I was not present, and learned of them only later through my friend. The climax of it all, I experienced in vivid detail.

Dr Joseph Bell, unlike many, made no secret that he possessed a talent. In my first year as his student, I remember seeing him chill a dissection specimen to preserve its condition. This he did before the entire class, and I daresay there were few who observed the dissection that day so closely as they observed the Doctor. Unsurprising, perhaps, that he was known as cold blooded. I, who had grown up hearing every variation of 'Sparky' and worse, could only sympathise. His power left many opportunities for those of little wit to construct jokes whose punch-lines always centered at ice in the veins. Yet I came to know a great deal of warmth in him.

The murder of Emily Hemmings was reported in the morning papers on a Monday in June, when the sun was kind and the breezes, when away from the river, were refreshing and lively. It was a beautiful summer indeed, and the article offered a gruesome counterpoint to the day outside. Emily Hemmings had been a maid. It was not the manner of her life that the newspapers found worth reporting, but the manner of her death. She had been vivisected.

Dr Bell was consulted because of one detail that the papers did not report- Emily Hemmings had possessed a mild fire talent. I was away with my brother at the time, and so did not accompany Bell on his earliest reconnaissance. I remembered the murder for the body's condition, drained and shell-like, but thought little further.

 

***

 

I knew Montaigne from university. He was a doctoral student with whom I had studied on occasion. He shunned deeper company, and was close to no one. Encountering him in a bookshop seemed coincidence, having a drink to catch up followed naturally.

I awoke on a table, what must have been repurposed from an operation theater- I could only pray it had not been used for dissection work instead. It was hard, unpadded and indeed uncovered, for there was not even a sheet between the board and the back of my head. My hands were tied down away from my body, making the arrangement of my limbs almost cruciform. The room little resembled a theater, and if it were a laboratory it was the most cluttered I've ever known. 

Montaigne must have drugged me. It was a simple enough conclusion to reach, yet it afforded me no further way to proceed. Indeed my thoughts proceeded sluggishly indeed, whatever compound had enervated my body had also drained and distracted my will. I could only observe. 

Montaigne proceeded through the verification and arrangement of his experimental apparatus. There was an inexorable expression, an inhuman detachment in those grey eyes. Never before had I viewed the science of engineering, of invention, in so sinister a light. I knew enough to identify the great cylinder on its low table as a battery, but its form was not one I recognised. Not until Montaigne set basins under both my hands and began to fill them did I realise what power he meant to harness and store.

The initial sparking fed upon itself and upon me, crackling along my skin and through every nerve in my body as it hadn't since I was a boy. The cascade did not burn off, did not wear down, for Montaigne's battery was every draining it away, encouraging the cycle to continue, the electrical currents to flow. I began to feel the effect of it; to fear that eventually electrical energy would not be all that was siphoned away. How long would it take to kill me? Would it do so before the electrical storm took me?

Time lost meaning.

At a stroke, the power cut off, finally interrupting that cyclical agony. It was some minutes before I recovered myself, and realized that help had come.

Bell pulled me upright on the table, but my body would not sustain it and I curled against him, pressed my face into the fabric of his coat. My limbs would not obey me, though my wet hands clutched ineffectually at his coat, and indeed all of me made to seek out that instinctual comfort of his physical presence. His watch chain was cold against my arm, icy cold, and his supportive embrace let me feel the rise and fall of his chest, the tension in his frame.

"Doyle!"

I made to answer, but my tongue was thick in my mouth, and my throat dry enough to click rather than swallow. 

"Can you speak?" I shook my head, and let it fall forward again.

He sighed, and I felt his hand cup the back of my neck, a gesture that brought heat to my eyes where I pressed them against his shoulder. 

It was not sight that alerted me. It was not any sense I could identify, unless it be that the overexposure to current had left me sensitized to every form of electromagnetism, even that of the human body. By whatever sense, I knew we were no longer alone.

Bell could not dodge, could not move from where he stood without leaving me open to Montaigne's aim, and I felt the set of his shoulders. The turn of his head as he regarded Montaigne, challenging him. That was something he would never do.

I did not shut my eyes. Indeed I was hardly aware of anything but the sight before me. 

The current still sparking in my veins had not ceased with the cessation of the battery circuit's pull, and everything in me that remained rebelled against any threat to this man. The current lept from my hand to the battery casing to ground itself in Montaigne's pistol, down his arm. And I very much fear, into his heart. 

I did not see past the current's discharge. Grey swept across my vision in a sickening swirl, then for a time I knew nothing. I reassure myself it cannot have been long, for I came back to myself on the floor beside the table, with Doctor Bell chafing my wrists. He ignored the small sparks that still lept from my skin, though I know they must have touched him- must have burned him. 

The steady cool brush of his ungloved fingers brought me fully back to myself, and I confess I held his palm to my aching forehead. I relished the chill of it, and it made him laugh, just a breath.

"Come along, my boy. We must get you home."


End file.
